H. P. Lovecraft—love him, hate him, you can’t deny that his prolific body of work has influenced countless horror creations in the near-century since his death. The Cthulhu Mythos alone has been referenced, parodied, or integrated wholesale into books, movies, games, and so on. The latter is especially applicable to Forgive Me Father, a first-person shooter developed by Byte Barrel and published by Fulqrum Publishing in early 2022. With a fascinating blend of comic-inspired visuals and Lovecraftian horror, it made for an uneven yet interesting foray into the bloody world of boomer shooters. After its success, a sequel was seemingly on the cards.
Around the game’s first anniversary, a sequel was revealed to be in active development. Forgive Me Father 2 entered Steam’s Early Access program on October 19th, 2023, leading to a fruitful year of development logs, incremental progress, and hopeful aspirations. But how does one follow up on a game that, for better or worse, was absolutely packed with content? How do you iterate on something that seemed to accomplish everything it was setting out to do?
Return to the Horror
Forgive Me Father 2 picks up some time after the events of Forgive Me Father, eschewing the dual protagonist setup of its predecessor in favor of focusing solely on the Priest. Locked in an asylum and plagued with horrifying visions, unresolved trauma, and fragments of his past, the Priest braves otherworldly horrors in order to stop the madness that plagues him, lest he give into it. What’s real? What isn’t? The asylum is the only constant in the Priest’s life now, serving as both a vessel for the madness and his only reprieve from it.
Gone are the expansive skill trees and the numerous abilities spread between characters. Instead, you now have two means of improving your abilities: the Dark Tome and your weapon upgrades.
The Dark Tome is the great equalizer, a book of tremendous power that can turn the tide of a fight in an instant. Killing enemies nets you madness, represented by a green bar broken into four segments. Each segment can power up a single use of the Dark Tome that, upon activating, grants you a set of incredible powers. It’s a bit simpler when compared to the first game, which had several different artifacts spread between two characters. Still, this simplicity opens the door for something much more interesting conceptually.
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The Dark Tome has pages you can collect, falling into either the “active” or “passive” category. You can carry a total of three pages at all times, made up of any combination of active and passive pages. The latter are always enabled at all times and tend to offer a flat increase for a key stat — stuff like damage, health, weapon improvements, etc. The former is where things get more interesting. By activating the Dark Tome, your chosen active abilities… well, activate. These can range from anything between granting you near-immortality, the ability to steal health from your enemies, or even bottomless magazines for your guns. This doesn’t last long, but it’s an effective means to even the odds in a dangerous situation.
Speaking of magazines—reloading is now a feature, compared to the original game’s lack of it. This is in tandem with the game’s newly revamped weapon upgrade system.
By gathering gems scattered throughout each level, be they in plain sight or hidden behind secrets, you’ll be able to buy variations of each gun in your arsenal. You’re no longer restricted by the branches of a skill tree. Instead, as long as you have the gems, you can buy any new weapon you want right off the bat.
The FPS staples are here and accounted for: a knife, a pistol, a shotgun, an assault rifle, an explosive weapon, and so on. They’re effective enough to justify their use throughout the entire game, even if they’re fairly plain. However, the variations you can unlock really open the door for some creative arsenals.
Take the pistol, for instance. The default one you start with is a punchy revolver; it’s slow but effective. You can subsequently turn it into a faster-firing semi-automatic pistol, or you can turn it into a living fish that spits dozens of needle-like teeth. Or you can even turn it into a beating heart that shoots bloody projectiles. Each weapon has four total variations, doubling down on their mechanical or Lovecraftian influences in a way that complements their newfound effects. The Exotic category is the only significant deviation from this, as the powerful Obelisk can be replaced with a gargantuan flamethrower or other eldritch munitions.
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Because of this, a greater level of tactical thinking needs to take place now when it comes to fighting. Instead of just whipping out whatever weapon feels most appropriate for the situation, you’re given the ability to weigh which weapons suit your playstyle for a specific level. If you don’t want an automatic weapon, you’re free to avoid them. If you want an arsenal comprised entirely of fish things and other terrifying monstrosities, you have the means to do so. Heck, if you even want to trade in your default knife for a horrifying abomination crammed into a tiny cage, that’s possible as well.
Locational damage makes a return from Forgive Me Father as well. That’s right—landing a well-placed shot on an enemy’s head will do much more damage than normal, even sometimes killing them outright. But that may not be the best solution for every foe you face. One enemy can simply reattach a new head to the space where the old one existed. Another may mutate into a stronger, more dangerous form. It’s something you’ll come to quickly recognize in the game’s biggest battles, leading you to prioritize which location to shoot. Or you could just blow everything up into a puddle of gore. It’s incredibly satisfying.
Cthulhu Is Lookin’ Good
In addition to the visual style overall, the game’s many monsters saw a significant facelift from Forgive Me Father. For one thing, enemy sprites no longer permanently face the player like in Doom or Wolfenstein 3D. Sprites exist for just about every viewing angle you can imagine while retaining their original art style. The hand-drawn, heavily inked illustrations are equally beautiful and horrific and accompany some substantial redesigns for certain enemies. The iconic tentacled soldiers, for instance, were originally found in the first game, though incorporating more vivid greens and exaggerated proportions makes for something that stands out better in a crowd.
The game’s levels are more distinctly memorable compared to the first game on top of that. Though you start out in the asylum and the dilapidated streets surrounding it, things really start to pop as otherworldly forces take hold. Infested botanical gardens, blown-out battlefields from the Great War, underground facilities, eldritch landscapes, and just about everything in between are as massive as they are beautiful. Colorful, too.
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There are no washed or monochromatic environments here, as the choice in locales offers some fantastic variety. They’re full of secrets, have plenty of verticality, and are fun to explore. Some even veer more into an overt horror theme, occasionally limiting your arsenal or visibility to add some spice to the combat encounters.
This goes hand-in-hand with the revamped lighting mechanic. While the first game featured plenty of dark areas that needed either a flashlight or lantern, the form and function of both items have been merged together in Forgive Me Father 2. Here, you’ll have to manually crank the flashlight to get up to two minutes of forward-facing light. It’s deliberate but dynamic enough to seamlessly incorporate itself into the game’s more difficult battles. It certainly helps that the snappy animation and excellent sound design make cranking the thing feel all the more satisfying.
And the music: At its worst, it’s perfectly serviceable. At its best, it’s a genuine earworm. Composed by the returning Tim Fialka, who also handled the first game’s soundtrack, Forgive Me Father 2 ratchets the intensity while incorporating a wider variety of soundscapes and atmospheric ambiance. Like the rest of the game, it’s bigger, bolder, and more boisterous overall.
If there’s anything that brings Forgive Me Father 2 down a few pegs, it would have to be its performance. For the most part, the game’s framerate was fairly consistent, though both Steam discussions and reviews have noted that it tends to jump all over the place. This is most apparent towards the end of the game, as the scale of battles you’ll encounter is significantly greater than what came before. On an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 card, it never dropped to the point of being unplayable, but it’s definitely something that really shouldn’t be an issue on higher-end cards.
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There are also some minor gripes to be found throughout, though they won’t dampen your enjoyment all that much. An inability to reread letters you collect throughout the story after you’ve read them once is a bit underwhelming; granted, the story in a game like this isn’t necessarily the biggest focus compared to everything else, but it would still be nice to see how different plot points tie together towards the end. One specific level towards the end of the game demands that you flip a set number of switches scattered across a wide, sprawling area, and that was the only map I ever had trouble navigating around. The final boss was also shockingly easy to defeat, especially when you look at the two that come before it.
Should You Buy Forgive Me Father 2?
If you liked Forgive Me Father, it’d be hard not to recommend Forgive Me Father 2 to some degree. A lot of the core content that made the first game so entertaining to begin with is still here, albeit with some significant modifications. While some fans of the original have expressed their disapproval of the gameplay changes, others have felt that the shift towards a card-based system and improved level design allows for some greater replayability. I’d also argue that it’s flat-out better than what came before, but that’s subjective.
At the very least, I found myself consistently enjoying Forgive Me Father 2 more than its predecessor. It’s a game that I felt compelled to revisit as soon as I put it down. It’s a game that I genuinely enjoyed looking at in addition to playing. It’s a game that, despite some minor faults, I feel is well worth its asking price. It may have left Early Access, but the door is still open for more improvements in the coming months.
Forgive Me Father 2 is currently available on Steam and GOG. If you’d like to listen to the game’s music in isolation or view its gorgeous art assets in a vacuum, the soundtrack and a digital art book are also available for purchase.
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